John 1:1-5 (MSG)
The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.Everything was created through him;
nothing—not one thing!—
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.
There’s really nothing like the gospel. It always captures me, always convicts, always places me back in the space I belong. Throughout my life, it has never changed, but my understanding and realization of it has grown, shrunk, and shifted based on the experiences that have filtered my perspective of it. The older I get, the more it seems I am the one in the way of it, as if my ability to hold it affects its ability to be true. But, thankfully, I am reminded during this Christmas season that a gospel so easily affected by my hands is far short of the gospel of Christ.
The gospel of John is many people’s favorite account of Jesus’s life, mainly because it is beautifully written in poetic symbolism. The beginning of John’s account is no exception, as it is seamlessly aligned to be a new rendition of a new beginning—a new light emerging from nothing. A thread of God’s Creation power now extending from Genesis’s natural order to the insides of the human heart. And while the Christ child was a new chapter of creation, he was always an intricate part of the original creation story, too— always present, always promised, always coming. Even still, he is more than the end or beginning result. He is the process, the beautiful intentionality, the profound fulfillment of a promise we didn’t even see. In complete darkness, he creates. And what he creates distinguishes who he is from who he's not.
I think everyone would like our external realities to mimic the beauty that the Christmas holiday represents for our spiritual reality. But, more times than not, this is not the case. For many of us, this year has proven to be riddled with difficulty after difficulty after difficulty. It has cast a shadow on every flicker of light we’ve been fortunate enough to see, and the effects of that have been both tangibly and intangibly felt. But Bethlehem always reminds me that it is difficulty and struggle that birth the Savior we celebrate. It is difficulty and struggle that deliver the fulfillment of God’s word and promise. And it is that same difficulty and struggle that offer the most powerful realizations of God’s presence and faithfulness to those willing to experience and endure. Perhaps there is no better evidence than Mary and Joseph—we make the mistake of glamorizing their story too often. Their surroundings were difficult and bleak, and certainly did not seem to affirm the things that were told to them. But they believed anyway. As they were literally on the run to save the life of their coming child, the son of God— they chose to believe. They weren’t even where they were trying to go! They were in their own kind of darkness. But, as we know so well, the Life-Light blazes out of that kind of darkness. The voids are where God’s creation are realized.
I’m not sure about you, but I long for that kind of Creation story. I crave it. I have found myself looking around trying to let my surroundings affirm truths I have always chosen to believe. And it begs the question of myself, how little have I learned about who God is, that what I believe is shaken OR strengthened by my situations, by what I see? How much time have I wasted trying to create evidence of affirmation for my own story script? That is not the way of Mary. That is not the way of Joseph. That is not the way of any example we have been given in chasing after God. Try as we might, I am convinced day after day that God is the chaser. He has always been after us. From Genesis to John, he has gone before us and come after us. Wherever you are and however you got there is not big enough to change or stop that truth. Neither us nor our situations are powerful enough to overthrow the truth of that gospel.
I’ll be the first to admit this Christmas season has felt tired and weary for me. More like a burden, rather than a celebration. But when I read the above passage from John this morning, I am reminded that what we are celebrating is a second creation, a creation that redeemed the broken story of the first, and yet, at the same time was apart of the first, all the same. A story whose telling says so much just in the way it is told, a story that reminds us we are not bound to the bleakness of a hard year. What we celebrate tomorrow cannot be touched by whatever this world throws. What we celebrate tomorrow is truer than anything your eyes can see. The Redemptive Creation power of our Father. From the voids of a formless world, He creates. From an animal’s feeding trough in the middle of nowhere, He creates. From the tomb itself, He creates. In 2020, in the midst of pandemics, political strife, racial tension— He creates. There is no darkness that is an exception to his authority.
Merry, Merry Christmas, friends. Let us celebrate that we have a God who comes after us— he always has, and he always will. The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness, and the darkness could not put it out. Amen to that.
-Alex